Jury to get Trumbull triple-murder death penalty case

Daniel Tepfer

Updated 12:51 am, Saturday, October 27, 2012

Murderer Richard Roszkowski Wednesday, June 6, 2012 during a pre-trial hearing to determine if he can represent himself in the penalty phase of his capital trial in Bridgeport Superior Court. Roszkowski was convicted for the 2006 murders of his former girlfriend, her 9-year-old daughter and his former roommate.
Photo: Autumn Driscoll

BRIDGEPORT -- A jury will decide if Richard Roszkowski gets the death penalty for the murders of a 9-year-old girl, her mother and a Milford landscaper, a judge ruled Friday.

Although the state Supreme Court may end up forever eliminating the death penalty for anyone, Superior Court Judge Robert Devlin agreed to move the case forward after the prosecutor, C. Robert Satti Jr., complained: "I don't think we should be sitting on our hands doing nothing."

The hearing will begin next September before a 12-member jury.

Roszkowski, a Trumbull drug user who lived with his mother in a senior citizen complex, was convicted in 2009 of forcing his former lover to drive him to the city's East End with her 9-year-old daughter, where he then shot her in the head in front of the horrified girl.

A landscaper who was nearby sought to intercede, and he, too, was coolly gunned down by Roszkowski, who then chased the girl down the street, shooting her in the back of the thigh, the face and finally the side of the head at close range as she begged for her life in September 2006.

Although the same jury that convicted Roszkowski of the crime subsequently found he should get the death penalty, the verdict was overturned on a technicality and a new penalty phase hearing was ordered.

Then last May, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy signed a law repealing the death penalty for any new cases.

The law leaves in place the nine men now on death row, including Russell Peeler Jr., who was convicted of ordering the murders of a mother and her young son in Bridgeport in 1999.

However, defense lawyers, including Roszkowski's public defender, Michael Courtney, claim the law is unconstitutional and have asked the state's highest court to hear their appeal. Courtney said a decision could come as soon as next fall; about the time the Roszkowski case is starting.

Bridgeport lawyer Michael Fitzpatrick, an expert on death penalty law who is now defending a man against the death penalty in Rockville, said he is confident the state Supreme Court will declare the current death penalty law unconstitutional.

"The fact that the state legislature passed a law that says it can't be applied retroactively doesn't make it constitutional," Fitzpatrick said. He said he believes the state Supreme Court will conclude that the law violates the 8th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution barring cruel and unusual punishment.

"It would be arbitrary to impose the death penalty when people committing the same crimes today cannot receive the death penalty. I think he (Roszkowski) has a good chance of avoiding the death penalty."

Dr. William Petit has been the state's strongest opponent of death penalty repeal, and was the main reason the new law was not made retroactive.

Petit is the lone survivor of a 2007 Cheshire home invasion that resulted in the brutal murders of his wife and two daughters. The two men convicted of the crime, Joshua Komisarjevsky and Steven Hayes, are on death row.

"There is no such thing as closure when your loved one is savagely taken from you," he testified previously in hearings on the repeal. "There can, however, be adequate and just punishment, and that is the death penalty."

Friday marked the first time the usually demonstrative Roszkowski had nothing to say in the courtroom. Dressed in a bright-orange prison jumpsuit, his hands and feet shackled, he calmly sat beside his lawyer at the defense table. Behind him sat several grim-faced, flak-vested corrections officers.